Blake Kingsley was everything I wasn’t.

He was born with a last name that opened doors and a smile that made people forget the damage he caused. The kind of boy who wore chaos like cologne and still got away with murder—academically, socially, emotionally. Blonde hair that always looked like he just ran a hand through it, sharp jaw, sharper tongue, and a voice that could either kiss or kill. Girls fell for him like dominoes, and he never looked back to see the mess he made.

And I was… not like them. I was a nobody, just a scholarship nerd at Harvard, dragging herself through double majors and all-nighters. I didn’t come from power or privilege. I came from library late nights and rejection emails. I had to claw my way into places boys like Blake Kingsley were born into. He was there for the Business program—because of course he was—and I was there to escape a life that told me I’d never belong.

But I didn’t hate him.

Somehow, despite everything, we kept finding each other. In quiet corners of campus. In study lounges at 3am when the world outside went still. In elevators where no words were said but eyes spoke novels. He’d pass me notes in lectures—dumb doodles, sarcastic remarks, half-spelled apologies. He started remembering how I took my coffee. I started noticing how he tapped his foot when he was nervous. We shared playlists. Shared silences. Shared cigarettes once on the rooftop of Lamont Library, where he told me his father never said “I’m proud of you.” I didn’t even smoke. I just wanted to understand him.

And for a while, I thought he was trying to understand me too.

It wasn’t romantic. Not exactly. But it was something. Something fragile. Something unspoken. Until that one night we were walking back to the dorms, and I tried to hold his hand—and he pulled away like I burned him. Didn’t even look at me. Just shoved his hands into his pockets and muttered something about how “people talk.”

Still, I stayed.

Because when we were alone, he was different. He played piano once. For me. He told me about the time he ran away at fifteen. He laughed like a kid when I showed him my old high school poetry and even said one line was “not that bad.” And that night we watched the snow fall from his window, he looked at me like I was everything he couldn’t say out loud.

But Blake Kingsley never said things out loud.

And maybe that’s why I wasn’t prepared for the night he invited me to the bar.

I thought it would be just us. Another quiet moment. Maybe something would finally be real.

But when I walked in, all his friends were there. The party kind. Loud, drunk, and dripping in old money. Girls who looked like they belonged next to him. I didn’t. He barely looked at me all night—just laughed at their jokes, flirted like I wasn’t even there, like I wasn’t the one who’d seen the boy under all that bravado.

I sat at the bar for hours, untouched, invisible. At one point, I reached out to touch his hand under the table, but he yanked it away instantly. Like it was a mistake. Like I was the mistake. And then—right when I was about to leave—he looked at me from across the bar. Really looked at me. Eyes darker than usual. Something unreadable behind them. He walked over slowly, like the moment meant something. And then he said— “You knew what this was… But you still hoped I’d choose you.”